Lightsquared May Lease Network Access from Sprint

Citing people familiar with Lightsquared's plans, Bloomberg today reports that Lightsquared is in talks with Sprint to purchase or lease wholesale access to Sprint's network. Sprint is planning a $5 billion network overhaul, which is says will leave it with enough extra capacity to offer to companies such as Lightsquared. Lightsquared is planning to offer a nationwide Long Term Evolution network that competes with AT&T and Verizon Wireless. It has spectrum of its own and launched a satellite in late 2010 which will complement its terrestrial network. It announced last week that it has already signed up two wholesale customers of its own. It's not clear exactly what spectrum Lightsquared is interested in using, nor what network technology, as Sprint itself uses 2.5GHz for WiMax. Neither Sprint nor Lightsquared offered comment.